Strange Days

Strange Days is an eerie, apocalyptic vision of the future set in LA in the last days of 1999. The film seems inspired by "Blade Runner" in its depiction of the big city, a world marked by race riots and crime.

Lenny Nero lives off reality, other people's reality, as a dealer in software for advanced virtual reality, in which the user for a while experiences and feels exactly the same as the person who lent their eyes and nerves to the recordings.

Lenny has his firm principles, though: he does not sell snuff, but one day he gets hold of just such an extremely unpleasant recording, which actually shows the sex murder of Iris, a friend of Lenny's. Perhaps the screenwriters were inspired by "Peeping Tom", for here too the victim gets the opportunity to watch her own murder, just in a somewhat more advanced way.

Lenny and his friend, the bodyguard Mace, set out to solve the case, which is more complicated than it seems. They come into possession of the disc that was supposedly the cause of Iris' death. If it gets into circulation, it could result in the race riot of the century. Lenny and Mace set things straight just before the new millennium begins.

Kathryn Bigelow is one of the few female directors who can tell action-packed stories just as forcefully as her male colleagues. There is not much sentimentality here apart from the slightly unrealistic ending, where Lenny finds out that it is actually Mace he loves and not his old girlfriend Faith. It is rare to breathe a sigh of relief when a woman accompanies a man on dangerous adventures. It is usually the other way round, so in that respect the director's gender does actually show.

Faith is played by Juliette Lewis, who once again is so dreadful that you wonder how Lenny could ever fall in love with her.

Strange Days is first and foremost a crime story, well hidden behind action and new technology, perhaps too well hidden. That may be connected with the plot being a bit muddled and the film becoming too long. The problem of voyeurism is also taken up in the film, but like most other films dealing with the theme, it ends up exploiting all the nasty things we see.